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on instagram today, my entire feed has been dominated by americans posting about mother's day, long loving messages to these women that brought them into the world and raised them. my heart swells for them, the sentiments are loving and caring and i am grateful that they have that love within them and surrounding them but after a while, it became too much, the emotions overwhelmed me and i thought about my mum and why it's been nearly six months since i last spoke to her, since i last went anywhere near her. it became too much to deal with. my exam anxiety is through the roof, i haven't studied nearly as much as i should have because of intense…

More strange than anything, but still containing Harmony Korine's overwhelmingly distinctive ability to find beauty in misery. His decision to follow the self-imposed filmmaking rules of the Dogme 95 manifesto (which was co-founded by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg) seem to fit naturally with his style. The grainy, picturesque visual quality, the hand-held camerawork, and the extremely loose narrative structure all embrace experimental, almost documentary-styled natural filmmaking. Revolving around a family that takes dysfunctional to a whole new level. Mainly centering on Julien, played by Ewen Premner, a young man suffering from schizophrenia. His performance is raw, complex, and easy to sympathize with. Chloë Sevigny plays Julien's sister Pearl who shines in a restrained performance that shines in a…

A friend came over today, and she asked me to show her one of my so called "weird films". After showing her Gummo last year, I knew she was ready for this gem. She was not. However, she loved it(and we where both left equally traumatized, as the credits rolled).

Harmony Korine is my favorite filmmaker, so I tend to rant about his greatness, and honestly, after watching this again, I feel like it's validated.

In my opinion, we need films like this now more than ever. The mainstream films has became so incredibly stale and lifeless, something that challenges, while still manages to touch is exactly what's missing.…

Ewen Bremner delivers easily the best and most authentic portrayal of a mentally handicapped person I've seen, and one of the best performances I've seen in general. Might be a 4.5 the more I think about it.

I fell in and out of sleep watching this one which normally means I’d omit it from my log, but from what I saw... yeah, swing and a miss. And of all directors to see pop up for a significant role in a Harmony Korine movie, Herzog is the one I both most and least anticipated.

Sorry if this gets a little too personal, but Jesus Christ. This movie hit me right where it hurts.

On Twitter, I called this "one of the greatest movies I never want to see again." And I mean that because one scene would be too painful for me to revisit. I have struggled with self harm in the past. I would often hit myself in the face to the point where I would get headaches for the rest of the day. These were when I got too anxious or stressed, when I felt I fucked something up for myself, or when I had pissed off one of my friends. Luckily, the problems aren't as bad as before, but…

Contrary to what the title may suggest, Harmony Korine is actually not making another coming-of-age story here... because Ewen Bremner was almost 30 at the time. I don't mean to be mean, but as Korine typically does mean to be, this title and Bremner's casting were probably the only things completely planned out for this film by pre-production. Everything else about this heavily improvised drama is fairly scatterbrained, a term I'm sure Korine, in that typical meanness, was hoping someone would use to describe the saga of a schizophrenic. His condition undiagnosed and untreated, Julien is basically Bremner reprising Spud Murphy on heroine on steroids, with a home life that is no less warm or stable. Living under the harassment…

I was rather skeptical about this going in as I'd assumed (based on Gummo and what I knew about Korine's style from around this period) that I was going to be presented with a bizarre but ultimately weightless series of vignettes using topics such as schizophrenia and abuse as something of a backdrop or catalyst for said events; seeing the Dogme 95 certification at the beginning also made me wonder if the intentionally ugly, grainy aesthetic would be used as a mere visual gimmick, but turns out I was wrong in both cases as the filmmaking at play not only comes across as genuinely human and authentic but is also emotionally impactful. I can't really think of a better way…

Felt very personal to me in how it treated those with differences. The least patronizing thing I've ever seen, bask in the glory of people living their lives, laugh with them, cry with them, but don't cry for them unless real understandable tragedy strikes. Which of course it does. A sobering ending that engages with the spaces these people find themselves in and why the degeneracy of the space is not something they choose. It's that degeneracy that ultimately has the potential to destroy them, it's not the people themselves.